OpenCrowd at Blockchain Week NYC 2019

New York City Blockchain Week 2019 officially kicked off on Friday, and we couldn't be more excited to participate in some of the great events scheduled for this week. Be sure to refer to this page for daily updates, recaps, and more from the OpenCrowd team as we navigate this monumental week for the blockchain industry. If you would like to know more about the events we will be attending this week, or want to connect with us at one of them, please reach out to info@opencrowd.com for more information.

Sunday, May 12th

Our Blockchain Week started off with a bang as we joined a number of prominent blockchain investors, executives, founders, and influencers at the 2nd annual CryptoNouveau event in Manhattan. This exlcusive event featured keynote speakers from industry titans, including David Chaum, founder of Elixxir.io and inventor of DigiCash, and Jules Miller, a partner at IBM's Blockchain Ventures group. Additionally, there were a number of lightning talks from CryptoNouveau partners concerning the current and future state of blockchain.

Tuesday, May 14th

Blockchain Week continued for us with an exciting day of conferences and meetups. To start the day, we stopped by Consensus to attend "The NEO Experience - Simplifying dApp Development". Led by Head of NEO Global Development John deVassos and blockchain engineer Longfei Wang, the conference introduced the basics of the NEO developer experience and walked through the process of designing and developing a real-world dApp. NEO is unique in that users can develop smart contracts in common languages, including Javascript, Python, and Go, instead of requiring use of a native language; thus, the second half of the panel covered how to configure and manage blockchain infrastructure, as well as how to use VS Code to rapidly develop, debug, and deploy smart contracts.

Following the NEO event, we stopped by the 100x Crypto Summit for an hour of investor speed dating followed by lightening talk and networking. This was followed by a showcase where many prominent companies, including Hedera Hashgraph, TenderMint, and Carbon, demonstrated their products' revolutionary capabilities.

To wrap up our day, we attended "Beyond Blockchain: The Future of DLTs", a meetup hosted by Hedera Hashgraph. There, Hedera Co-Founder Dr. Leemon Baird gave a fantastic presentation on some of the most cutting-edge features of the Hashgraph platform, including the criticallity of fair timestamps and how advanced key types, including hierarchical thresholds and binding arbitration, can help acheive fairness. Additionally, Dr. Baird explained in detail for the first time how the Hashgraph state proof establishes trust in a trustless environment. We are honored to have played a role in the development of this revolutionary platform!